Author Citations

[myxomop]

There doesn't appear to be support for providing author citations in the creating of new or editing of existing taxa.  Perhaps there is a field I am not seeing, but a conversation with a significantly more experienced iNat user revealed that this may indeed be an oversight.

[Scott Loarie]

iNat taxa do have a 'source' association. But correct there's no place to store or display author citations

On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 8:43 AM, myxomop <new...@gmail.com> wrote:

There doesn't appear to be support for providing author citations in the creating of new or editing of existing taxa.  Perhaps there is a field I am not seeing, but a conversation with a significantly more experienced iNat user revealed that this may indeed be an oversight.

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Scott R. Loarie, Ph.D.
Co-director, iNaturalist.org
California Academy of Sciences
55 Music Concourse Dr
San Francisco, CA 94118
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[myxomop]

Might I ask why?

On Wednesday, September 6, 2017 at 12:32:32 PM UTC-4, Scott Loarie wrote:

iNat taxa do have a 'source' association. But correct there's no place to store or display author citations

On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 8:43 AM, myxomop <new...@gmail.com> wrote:

There doesn't appear to be support for providing author citations in the creating of new or editing of existing taxa.  Perhaps there is a field I am not seeing, but a conversation with a significantly more experienced iNat user revealed that this may indeed be an oversight.

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[Scott Loarie]

Just not something that was ever built into iNat. If you add them to the corresponding Wikipedia pages, they will display on the iNat taxon pages.

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[myxomop]

With all due respect, Mr. Loarie, I think that's kind of absurd.  I was willing to reinvent the staggeringly large fungal nomenclatural wheel on Mushroom Observer for the past ten years, one name page at a time, but I am not willing to do it twice, nor should anyone else.  I made an exception for MO when their tiny, volunteer skeleton crew of a development team said that integrating with an existing nomenclatural database was beyond their ability and above their paygrade.  Part of the reason I'm interested in switching to iNat is on the presumption that such things that were not possible there are possible here.  It is unreasonable and unrealistic to make this the work of the either the average user or the already time-strapped taxonomist when it has already been done and is being done (and done well) outside of iNat with money and people specifically dedicated to that purpose.

I've read the paragraph on fungi at http://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide.  I see no reason why MycoBank can't serve as as the authority for fungal nomenclature, with the option for fungal curators to make iNat-specific edits when and where necessary.

[Scott Loarie]

Hmm- my apologies if I misunderstood. I was just trying to answer your question by saying that iNat as it is built doesn't store/display author citations on taxon pages. Certainly, anything *can* be built - I wasn't offering any opinions on that front.

But you've lost me with how the absence of functionality to store/display author citations relates to the broader issue of sourcing/maintaining taxonomy that you've raised. On iNat the admins maintain the base of the tree (everything coarser than order), and for clades finer than that, there are essentially 3 flavors for maintaining taxonomies:

1) Clades where curators should 'follow the peer-reviewed primary literature' because there aren't stable global sources resolving issues as they come up (e.g. Nematodes)

2) Clades where curators should match one or more prioritized External Source Taxonomies  (e.g. Birds with Clements v2017)

3) Clades were the iNat community maintains a formal Internal Reference Taxonomy (e.g.  Amphibians with http://www.inaturalist.org/journal/loarie/11101-internal-reference-taxonomies-amphibian-pilot)

I sort of steer clear of Fungus, but my understanding was that on iNat folks were going with Approach 2 with Index Fungorum as the External Source Taxonomy but that various disputes over Index Fungorum shifted things to Approach 1 which is where things are now.

If you're saying that you want to move back to Approach 2 with MycoBank, that seems like a reasonable proposal but I'd definitely discuss with the Fungus community on iNat, ie these folks:

http://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&subview=grid&view=observers&iconic_taxa=Fungi

http://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&subview=grid&view=identifiers&iconic_taxa=Fungi

Best,

Scott

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[myxomop]

Scott,

Thank you for the clarification.  Indeed, a MycoBank-centered Approach 2 would be a major boon to the fungal side of iNat, and better still if it could be paired with some support for hand-spun provisional naming.  Posts like these:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/inaturalist/nSXEUKwKvSI

make a great case for the importance of giving taxonomists a degree of creative control when it comes to any biodiversity database's naming and sorting functions.

Two things though:

1. I know most of the top fungus observers on the site, but I don't believe any of them are developers here.  Are you looking for some kind of consensus from that community before iNat staff were to move forward?

2. Does reliance on an "External Source Taxonomy" mean support for author citations?  How was author citations not automatically, unquestioningly a part of the site from the beginning?

-Danny

[Scott Loarie]

Hi Danny,

 

1. I know most of the top fungus observers on the site, but I don't believe any of them are developers here.  Are you looking for some kind of consensus from that community before iNat staff were to move forward?

Changing the curator policies would be a community decision to be made by the curators. It wouldn't take any functionality changes and thus wouldn't take any staff time. It would just require coming to consensus/agreement and articulating a plan for how to manage Fungus taxonomy on iNaturalist and also updating the curator guide

2. Does reliance on an "External Source Taxonomy" mean support for author citations?  How was author citations not automatically, unquestioningly a part of the site from the beginning?

 

If you mean functionality to store/display author citations on taxon pages, then no. As I mentioned, that functionality doesn't exist in iNat. 

 

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[myxomop]

Scott,

I don't see how iNat can aspire to any degree of taxonomic specificity and certainty if it does not take author citations into account.  Is this functionality that you/other developers/people in charge at iNat don't wish to see on the site?  If so, why not?

-Danny

[Charlie Hohn]

The iNat taxonomy is based on secondary sources, so if i am understanding right, including the author citations is kind of irrelevant is it not? Are you talking about the citation that is often appended after the Latin name? I never really understood the point of pasting that everywhere. Or are you discussing something totally different? I think there's a big difference between pinning fungi taxonomy to a solid external source (sounds good to me) and adding the 'author' name to each scientific name (i don't see the point here). But, maybe I am just confused, and also, I am more familiar with plants than fungi. But I'd vote against using any admin/curator time to paste more text onto each scientific name.

[myxomop]

They are absolutely, intricately and inextricably linked:

You don't have real, functioning, scientific taxonomy without author citations.  Plain and simple.

[Charlie Hohn]

thats your opinion, not based on any actual reality of ecology or anything else, and there's nothing 'plain and simple' about ecology, ever.  Most people here are more interested in actually identifying organisms than in attaching people's names to them. but if you really want to you could create a field and add them into your own observations manually. I don't want that stuff cluttering up my interface. I can look it up in a botanical manual or whatever if i care.

[ja_c...@hotmail.com]

A mixture of taxonomy and nomenclatural comments here I think.

The author citation pins down the name as a nomenclatural object. Having it is especially useful for disambiguating homonyms, i.e. two names spelt the same, with different authors (or sometimes the same) but based on different type collection, ie different taxa.

Under the nomenclatural code only one such name can be valid/legitimate and the rest ignored. Most of the time most end-users of names (iNat included) do not need to know/see authors. They may appear usefully in statements of synonymy, but iNat doesn't serve synonymy. For a resource like iNat, or indeed any other database using names, the critical requirement is to be able to unambiguously link names together residing in different sources, so that data may be usefully integrated. In an ideal world we would have a single global catalogue of names of all organisms linked to permanent identifiers, and the identifiers would serve to link data. There continue to be attempts to do that at the global level. It is needed because 'name strings' with our without authors, are ineffective as stable unique identifiers. In the world of mycology the global nomenclator for all historical names is IndexFungorum, Mycobank iis based on a copy of the data contained in IndexFungorum. Both resources are also name registration centres and so both (try at least) to keep a synchronised complete set of names as new ones are minted. Both resources have web-services that can be used to look-up names and automatically retrieve data (including authors if required) but more importantly maintain the linkage between the resources based on those names. iNat uses such web-srevices, where avalailable, to retrieve name data from similar resources. I don't recall if it uses IndexFungorum in that way, but it could, and equivalently from MycoBank. It certainly uses our national digital species checklist in that way (NZOR) and that also maintains all the behind-the-scenes identifier linkages to resources like IndexFungorum, IPNI and so-on. There should not be no need to manually enter species names in iNat, or include authors to disambiguate homonyms. Finally, these resources are primarily nomenclators, ie databases of names and their standing under the codes. Taxonomic opinion about the correct use of a name to represent a taxon is a different issue. The iNat standard is to appeal to 'secondary sources' for that opinion. In the world of mycology it would be good if SpeciesFungorum or Mycobank served that role globally, but neither does an adequate job in that regard, in my opinion.

[Charlie Hohn]

I'm not saying the information isn't important. Though i do take exception to a whole species having an 'Author' unless you're talking about some sort of deity (or maybe Monsanto :(  ). These people didn't 'write' the species, they described it. But that aside... the info is useful which is why our secondary references have that info... if our go-to taxonomic reference for mushrooms has that info, and we link to that, i think it's pointless to have it here also. I specifically don't think we should have giant strings of text everywhere like the screenshot posted above. Great in botanical and fungal manuals, not good for iNat. If someone wants to spend their own time and money putting it in the species page i guess it doesn't matter, but i don't want it displaying on the species name everywhere on the site.  I'm not gonna rage-quit over it, but i think it's pointhess and honestly, kind of pedantic and colonial. But that's maybe roaming a bit off topic.

[bouteloua]

"Taxonomic specificity" should already be accounted for in iNat by checking the source for that taxon and checking the author listed on that source. But I just realized--can non-curators even see a taxon's source? The only place I can find it is going in to edit the taxon and checking that edit page, which is only accessible to curators/admin. Shouldn't this be displayed clearly on the Taxonomy tab?  

I also wonder if it's possible that author information could largely be mass-imported into iNat by the developers from the various databases (I am probably showing naivety here). It would be nice not to rely on Wikipedia or EOL or finding/checking the taxonomic source. But, this would be a very low priority for me on iNat--probably because I am not a taxonomist, I am most interested in plants (fewer taxonomic concepts than fungi?), and for me that information is usually easily found elsewhere.

I agree that visually displaying the author everywhere after a scientific name would be overkill and unlikely ever to be implemented on iNat  

cassi